The inventive concept relates generally to optical communication, and more particularly to an optical interface module for a coherent reception, an optical memory module, and optical memory system comprising the optical interface module.
As operational speeds of semiconductor devices increase, the speed of communication buses should increase accordingly to support higher-speed communication from those devices. For example, the operational speed of memory buses may be required to increase to facilitate communication between high-speed memory controllers and high speed memory devices. Where a memory bus is implemented with an electrical channel, undesired effects such as signal distortion, noise, delay, etc., may decrease reliability and/or limit the operational speed.
To avoid the limits of electrical channels, researchers are developing optical communication buses using optical channels. Optical communication buses may increase the speed and reliability of transferred data because optical signals experience less interference than electrical signals. In implementing high-speed and/or high-capacity memory systems, the number of light sources may increase with the number of the memory modules that are optically-connected to a memory controller. The increase in light sources may increase manufacturing costs and power consumption, which can limit the number of memory modules that can be included in a memory system.